As Zika spreads throughout the world, the call for rapid development of therapeutics to treat virus rings loud and clear. Taking a step further in identifying a possible therapeutic candidate, a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke-NUS Medical School (a collaboration between Duke University and the National University of Singapore) has discovered the mechanism by which C10, a human antibody previously identified to react with the Dengue virus, prevents Zika infection at a cellular level.

Previously, C10 was identified as one of the most potent antibodies able to neutralize Zika infection. Now, Ralph Baric, PhD, professor of epidemiology in UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Shee-Mei Lok, PhD, associate professor in the Duke-NUS Emerging Infectious Disease Programme, have taken it one step further by determining how C10 is able to prevent Zika infection.

Dr. Ralph Baric

To infect a cell, virus particles usually undergo two main steps, docking and fusion, which are common targets for disruption when developing viral therapeutics. During docking, the virus particle identifies specific sites on the cell and binds to them. With Zika infection, docking then initiates the cell to take the virus in via an endosome – a separate compartment within the cell body. Proteins within the virus coat undergo structural changes to fuse with the membrane of the endosome, thereby releasing the virus genome into the cell and completing the fusion step of infection.

“By defining the structural basis for neutralization, these studies provide further support for the idea that this antibody will protect against Zika infection, potentially leading to a new therapy to treat this dreaded disease,” said Baric.

Using a method called cryoelectron microscopy, which allows for the visualization of extremely small particles and their interactions, the team examined how C10 interacts with the Zika virus under different pHs, so as to mimic the unique environments both the antibody and virus will find themselves in throughout infection. They found that C10 binds to the main protein that makes up the Zika virus coat, regardless of pH, and locks these proteins into place, thereby preventing the structural changes required for the fusion step of infection. Without fusion of the virus to the endosome, viral DNA is prevented from entering the cell, and infection is thwarted.

“Hopefully, these results will further accelerate the development of C10 as a Zika therapy to combat its effects of microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome,” Lok said. “This should emphasize the need for further studies of the effect of C10 on Zika infection in animal models.”

These findings suggest that C10 may be developed as a therapy for Zika infection and should be further explored. In addition, disrupting fusion with C10 may prove to be more effective in preventing Zika infection compared with other therapies that attempt to disrupt docking. This is because the fusion step is critical for Zika infection, while the virus may eventually develop other mechanisms to overcome disruptions to the docking step. With the urgent need for rapid development of Zika therapies, C10 has emerged as a front runner to answer the call.

Published online Nov. 24 by Nature Communications, this research was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 3 Grant (MOE2012-T3-1-008), the National Research Foundation Investigatorship Award (NRF-NRFI2016-01 to Shee-Mei Lok), the Duke-NUS Signature Research Programme funded by the Ministry of Health, Singapore, and the United States National Institute of Health AID Research Grants (AI100625, AI107731 to Ralph Baric).

Michael R. Kosorok, PhD, W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of biostatistics at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

Election as a fellow, a tradition that began in 1874, is an honor bestowed upon an AAAS member by his or her peers for a member’s advancement of science in ways that are scientifically or socially distinguished.

Kosorok was honored for his meritorious contributions to biostatistics, in survival analysis, empirical processes and semiparametric models, statistical learning theory and personalized medicine, and for extraordinary administrative service.

He has led a number of National Institutes of Health grants, including a Big Data to Knowledge in Biomedicine grant to train students from multiple disciplines to develop career-long relationships with big data. He co-leads the National Cancer Institute’s Statistical Methods for Cancer Clinical Trials to develop new methods for the design and analysis of cancer clinical trials.

Since 2006, he has served as chair of biostatistics in the Gillings School, professor of statistics and operations research in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, and member of the University’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He serves as director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute’s biostatistics core and as research fellow at UNC’s Cecil B. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

Among his honors are fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association and numerous invitations throughout his career to give distinguished lectures around the world.

The AAAS will honor Kosorok and 390 other fellows on Feb. 18, 2017, at the AAAS Fellows Forum, held during the association’s annual meeting in Boston.

Uninsured women under age 65 who received their mammogram at community screening clinics in North Carolina were less likely to get follow-up within a year of a positive mammogram. They also had higher odds of missing a 60-day window for follow-up care, according to a study by senior author Louise Henderson, PhD, and colleagues.

Dr. Louise Henderson

Henderson is an adjunct assistant professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She also is an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology in UNC’s School of Medicine and is a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“If we’re going to use mammography to screen women for breast cancer, we need to make sure that women with a positive result receive the needed follow-up care, regardless of insurance,” said Henderson. “As expected, women without insurance may need more support to make sure they get timely follow-up care.”

Approximately 40 million mammography exams are conducted in the United States each year. The U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, citing studies that link mammography exams to a reduction in breast cancer deaths, recommends that women aged 50 to 74 years have a mammogram every other year. The American Cancer Society advises women to undergo annual screening starting at age 45, and adds that women between ages 40 and 44 should have the opportunity to begin annual screening as well.

Previous studies have found that one in 10 mammograms require additional follow-up, although the majority do not result in cancer diagnosis. Another study found that a three-to-six-month delay to treatment from symptom onset was linked both to larger tumor sizes at diagnosis and to lower survival rates.

In the newly published study, researchers wanted to know if insurance influenced how quickly patients were able to get a follow-up appointment after a positive mammogram. They analyzed data from the Carolina Mammography Registry, a collection of breast imaging information for patients who have gone to community radiology facilities – excluding academic centers ­­­— in N.C. They used data gathered between 1995 and 2010 to study the cases of 43,026 women aged 40 years and older who had a positive screening mammogram.

Their analysis found that women younger than age 65 with no insurance had 60 percent higher odds of not getting follow-up care within the recommended 60 days of a positive mammogram. Even after a year, these women were 53 percent less likely to have received follow-up.

In terms of overall numbers, 18 percent of women under age 65 without insurance did not get follow-up within 60 days, compared to 11 percent of women in that age group with private insurance.

“We found that there are women who aren’t getting follow-up after a positive screening mammogram, and we need to understand why so we can determine what to do about it,” Henderson said. “It does seem to vary by insurance, based on some of the data. While it is possible that women could have received care outside of the group of community clinics that participated in our study, we don’t know if this is the case.”

There are resources available to help women gain access to mammograms through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, but Henderson said there could be a need for additional aid.

Danielle Durham, PhD, the study’s first author and an alumna of the Department of Epidemiology at the Gillings School, highlighted the need for more research to determine if any of the women in the study went for follow-up outside of the study’s catchment area.

“It’s important to remember that this is a particular population of people who have sought care,” said Durham, who is now a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute. “It would be interesting to see if these trends would be replicated in other populations in the U.S.”

In addition to Henderson and Durham, other study authors associated with the Gillings School include Whitney R. Robinson, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology, Stephanie B. Wheeler, PhD, associate professor of health policy and management, J. Michael Bowling, PhD, research associate professor of health behavior and adjunct research associate professor of biostatistics, and Andrew F. Olshan, PhD, Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in Cancer Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Epidemiology.

Four co-investigators from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will lead a five-year, multicenter clinical trial titled Medical Optimization and Management of Pregnancies with Overt Type 2 Diabetes (MOMPOD). MOMPOD will examine the impact of combined Metformin and insulin therapy on infant outcomes with mothers experiencing Type 2 diabetes in pregnancy.

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development awarded $4.2 million over five years to support MOMPOD.

Dr. Sonia Davis

The multidisciplinary project is co-led by four researchers at UNC: Sonia Davis, DrPH, Professor of the Practice of biostatistics at the Gillings School of Global Public Health and director of the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center, Kim Boggess, MD, professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the School of Medicine, Diane Berry, PhD, associate professor and Beerstecher-Blackwell Distinguished Term Scholar in the School of Nursing, and Laura Young, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism in the School of Medicine.

Pregnancy naturally results in a mother’s body experiencing an increased resistance to insulin, which allows more glucose to be transferred into energy to fuel fetal development. Unfortunately, more than 100,000 women per year in the United States experience Type 2 diabetes during pregnancy, in which the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to manage the amount of glucose that remains in the blood. More than one-third of pregnancies in mothers with Type 2 diabetes have some type of adverse neonatal outcome, such as premature delivery, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) at birth, infants that are large-for-gestational age or birth trauma.

Insulin therapy has been the standard for treating Type 2 diabetes during pregnancy, but adverse outcomes still exist. Outside of pregnancy, the drug Metformin is favored over insulin by the American Diabetes Association because it results in less weight gain and fewer hypoglycemic episodes. Metformin currently is not recommended for treating Type 2 diabetes in pregnancy, however, due to a lack of large-scale clinical studies.

The MOMPOD Study Consortium will address this gap with an enrollment goal of 1,200 mothers who will be randomized to receive either Metformin or a placebo in addition to insulin.

“Our aim is to test whether the addition of Metformin during pregnancy will decrease the rate of adverse neonatal outcomes,” Davis said.

Results from a previous pilot study of Metformin conducted by Boggess suggested that a combination of Metaformin plus insulin may allow pregnant mothers to better manage their Type 2 diabetes – with fewer episodes of hypoglycemia – than women on insulin alone. These early results encouraged the development of MOMPOD.

“A majority of the maternal-fetal health providers we surveyed believed it should be a treatment continued on through pregnancy, but think it needs the FDA’s blessing,” stated Boggess. “We are eager to help find a better solution than the current insulin-only practice, should MOMPOD’s results prove positive.”

In addition to UNC, nine other institutions will collaborate on the multi-site study:

Ohio State University

Columbia University

University of Alabama at Birmingham

University of California at San Diego

University of Mississippi Medical Center

University of Pennsylvania

University of Utah

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

Each site was chosen based on geographic and population diversity as well as institutional reputation for upholding research protocol, making the data gathered more generalizable to all women in the U.S. with Type 2 diabetes in pregnancy.

The MOMPOD Study Consortium will begin enrollment in January 2017. All data collected during the study will be managed and analyzed by the UNC Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC).

“The CSCC excels in the design, implementation and analysis of multi-center, randomized clinical trials such as MOMPOD,” said Davis. “We are thrilled to be partnering with the UNC School of Medicine on this important study. MOMPOD will benefit from CSCC’s long-time experience conducting multi-center trials, including prior studies of Metformin.”

Participating clinical trial sites will randomize participants and record data in UNC’s state-of-the-art, web-based CDART data management system. CDART (Carolina Data Acquisition and Reporting Tool) was collaboratively developed by the CSCC and the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute for the collection, management and reporting of data for large-scale, multi-site trials.

An additional goal of the consortium is to track long-term outcomes following delivery. For this reason, participants will be invited to join the MOMPOD Dyad Registry, which plans to maintain contact with participating mothers and infants for an additional five-year period.

MOMPOD is an R01 grant that has been eight years in the making and required a large, collaborative effort between multiple institutions and schools at UNC.

It represents the largest trial of Type 2 diabetes in pregnancy ever conducted in the U.S., and the findings potentially will define the optimal therapy for pregnant women with Type 2 diabetes in the future.

The Gillings School of Global Public Health received special recognition during the ceremonies of yesterday’s University Day, which marked the 223rd anniversary of the University of North Carolina’s founding. Two people affiliated with the Gillings School, Eugenia Eng and Paula Brown Stafford, were celebrated in person, and the historic legacy of two others, Genevieve Lowery Cole and William Alexander Darity Sr., were acknowledged as pioneering “firsts.”

Dr. Eugenia Eng

Paula Brown Stafford

Eugenia Eng, DrPH, alumna and professor of health behavior at the Gillings School, accepted the Edward Kidder Graham Faculty Service Award, which recognizes a faculty member’s outstanding service to the University, state and nation.

Paula Brown Stafford, MPH, former president of clinical development at Quintiles who received undergraduate and master’s degrees in biostatistics at the Gillings School, was named one of five University Distinguished Alumni.

Graham Faculty Service Award

Dr. Geni Eng, a trailblazer in community-engaged scholarship, refined the innovative lay health adviser intervention model, an approach that builds on the social support function of social networks that exist naturally within communities.

The model is an “assets-based” approach to community-based research that encourages partnerships among professionally trained health educators, academics and lay community residents.

Eng first tested the model with African-American churches in North Carolina. Through her research and practice, she has left in place dozens of active, robust lay health adviser networks in communities throughout North Carolina.

She also pioneered action-oriented community diagnosis, a unique and effective tool for community assessment, planning and mobilization. She has worked with dozens of North Carolina communities to conduct community diagnoses and trained hundreds of students over several decades. The impact of this body of work can be seen in stronger North Carolina communities.

Recognized nationally as an innovator in the area of community-based participatory research (CBPR), a practice that meets the highest ethical standard for research done in communities, Eng has fostered collaborative and participatory partnerships among academics, community-based organizations and health practitioners across North Carolina and in African and Southeast Asian countries.

After completing an undergraduate degree at The University of Wisconsin at Madison, Eng served two years in the Peace Corps. She subsequently earned Master of Public Health and Doctor of Public Health degrees at UNC-Chapel Hill and joined the faculty of UNC’s public health school in 1984.

She is the winner of numerous UNC and national awards, including the Robert Allen Symbol of HOPE Award from the American Journal of Health Promotion (1999); the Thomas A. Bruce Award of Honor from the American Public Health Association’s Community-Based Public Health Caucus (2008); and the Distinguished Fellow Award from the Society for Public Health Educators (2010). From UNC, she received the Greenberg Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service (2001), the UNC Provost’s Award for Engaged Scholarship (2006) and the Gillings Teaching Innovations Award (2016). In 2014, she was inducted as an inaugural member of the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship.

University Distinguished Alumna

Paula Brown Stafford had a successful 30-year career with Quintiles, the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services, a Fortune 500 company and one of Fortune magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies.”

During those decades, she was involved directly in the successful development and regulatory approval of hundreds of life-changing drug therapies for patients both in North Carolina and throughout the entire world.

Joining Quintiles in 1985, Stafford was the 23rd employee at the fledgling company, which today boasts more than 36,000 employees conducting business in 100 countries. As president of clinical development, her part of Quintiles’ business generated nearly three-quarters of the company’s $4.3 billion in net revenue for 2015.

A recognized leader in the field of biopharmaceutical development, she was invited to provide expert testimony before a Congressional hearing in 2014 on the topic of modernizing clinical trials. There, she provided recommendations and possible approaches in three key areas of drug development—patients, pathways and processes—to accelerate the delivery of therapies to patients. A statement from her testimony summarizes the focus of her work: “Modernizing clinical trials is critical if we are to meet the goals we share of delivering medicines faster, at less cost, to patients who need them.”

Stafford’s impact in the ever-changing field of health care and pharmaceutical development became personal upon the completion of her first beginning-to-end clinical trial. In that trial, she oversaw the development of a diabetes drug that has allowed her own grandmother to live well into her 90s by managing the chronic disease that affects roughly 30 million adults in the United States alone.

Since retiring from Quintiles in 2015, Stafford provides leadership consulting services to various organizations and serves as an adjunct professor at the Gillings School, where she previously served as president of the Public Health Foundation board of directors. She also serves on the board of directors for Health Decisions, a full-service contract research organization based in Durham, N.C.

Scholarships were also named for Cole and Darity. The official citations read aloud at the ceremony recognized them both as pioneers who represented historic “firsts” at UNC. Specifically:

Genevieve Lowery Cole

Dr. William Darity

Genevieve Lowery Cole, MPH, a member of the Lumbee tribe, Cole was the first female American Indian student to graduate from Carolina. After earning a degree in medical technology she worked in clinical labs at the University of California Medical Center and later returning to Carolina for her master’s degree in public health. She went on to a successful career as a microbiologist working at both Duke and N.C. State universities.

William Alexander Darity Sr., PhD, in 1964 became the first black student to earn a doctorate from Carolina in what is now the Gillings School of Global Public Health. He was founding dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an emeritus professor. Darity served Carolina as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1985 to 1991 during a period that included board debate about race and inclusion issues.

About University Day

Members of the environmental sciences and engineering faculty (l-r) Drs. Will Vizuete, Barbara Turpin, Mike Aitken and Jamie Bartram prepare to join the University Day procession in 2015.

University Day is an occasion to remember the University’s past and celebrate its future. The date, Oct. 12, marks the laying in 1793 of the cornerstone of Old East, the institution’s first building and the oldest state university building in the U.S. The UNC community first celebrated University Day in 1877, after Governor Zebulon B. Vance, as chair of the board of trustees, ordered that the day “be observed with appropriate ceremonies under the direction of the faculty.”

Since 1971, the faculty has presented the Distinguished Alumna and Alumnus Awards on University Day to recognize those who have made outstanding contributions to humanity.

The Edward Kidder Graham Award, established in 2010 to recognize outstanding service by a member of the faculty, calls to remembrance UNC President Graham’s ambition to “to make the campus co‐extensive with the boundaries of the State,” in the context of the University’s modern mission to extend knowledge‐based service worldwide.

For 223 years, Carolina has symbolized the importance of education in a democratic nation. It remains a place defined by those values, as noted by Governor Terry Sanford in 1987, of “freedom and liberty and tolerance, the search for truth, the defense of dignity, courage to arrive freely at convictions, and the personal courage to stand for those hopes and truths.”

This year, the University Day celebration was held on Oct. 11, in observance of Yom Kippur on Oct. 12.

The Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC), housed in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics, has been awarded funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to serve as the coordinating center for the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATN), a research network devoted to the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults with HIV or at risk for HIV infection.

Dr. Michael Hudgens

Dr. Myra Carpenter

In addition to the CSCC funding, the funding for the ATN, which will be up to $24 million in 2016, establishes three research hubs across the United States, one of which includes researchers at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The ATN Coordinating Center, led by co-principal investigators Myra A. Carpenter, PhD, senior investigator at the CSCC, and Michael Hudgens, PhD, professor of biostatistics at the UNC Gillings School, will serve as the central resource for network communications and research operations including cataloging of biosamples, data management and statistical analysis.

“I am excited to be expanding the CSCC’s research portfolio to include the ATN,” said Carpenter. “Our work in the ATN is a perfect match with our center’s mission to improve public health by coordinating important health research, developing innovative research methodology, and providing practical training in the application of research methods.”

ATN aims to obtain care for at-risk youth, while at the same time offering them opportunity to participate in research trials that have potential to improve their health and the health of others. The newly funded ATN centers will conduct studies aimed at preventing HIV infection among youths. They also will seek to enroll HIV-infected youths into treatment studies to improve their health and reduce their chances of spreading the virus.

To achieve these goals, the CSCC will provide innovative, forward-looking and productive services that bring cohesion to the participating investigators by sharing their visions and providing scientific leadership, organizational support and analytic results for ATN projects.

Key elements that will enhance collaboration and research progress include experienced leadership, innovative design and analysis methodologies, comprehensive research operations support, a state-of-the-art data management system and superior administrative support. The CSCC’s integrated structure will set the stage for collaboration and extraordinary research productivity from protocol development through research data sharing.

ATN is funded by the NIH through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with supplemental funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced $157 million in awards to several leading institutions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to launch a seven-year initiative called Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO). ECHO will investigate how exposure to environmental factors in early development – from conception through early childhood – can influence the health of children and adolescents.

Dr. Rebecca Fry

Dr. Michael O’Shea

UNC, which was awarded $5 million over two years by the NIH – with the potential for $33 million over seven years – will join several other universities to enroll more than 50,000 children from diverse racial, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds to become part of the ECHO consortium. Planned studies will analyze existing data, as well as follow children over time, to address the early environmental origins of ECHO’s health outcome areas, including upper and lower airway health and development, obesity, and brain and nervous system development.

Rebecca Fry, PhD, associate professor of environmental sciences and engineering and director of the UNC Superfund Research Program in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, is the co-principal investigator on the UNC ECHO grant. She will lead the initiative alongside principal investigator Michael O’Shea, MD, division chief of neonatal-perinatal medicine in the Department of Pediatrics in the UNC School of Medicine. Another key researcher from the Gillings School is Sonia Davis, DrPH, director of the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center in the biostatistics department.

“This research is paradigm-shifting in its focus on the placental epigenome as a driver of children’s health,” Fry said. “The ECHO studies have the potential to identify key environmental influences and pathways to help us prevent disease in children.”

The NIH award will build the infrastructure and capacity for the ECHO program to support multiple, synergistic longitudinal studies that extend and expand existing cohort studies of mothers and their children. A critical component of ECHO will be using the NIH-funded Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) program to build state-of-the art pediatric clinical research networks in rural and medically underserved areas, so that children from these communities can participate in clinical trials.

Experiences during sensitive developmental windows, including around the time of conception, later in pregnancy, and during infancy and early childhood, can have long-lasting effects on the health of children. These experiences encompass a broad range of exposures, from air pollution and chemicals present in neighborhoods, to societal factors such as stress, to individual behaviors like sleep and diet. These exposures may affect any number of biological processes, such as the expression of genes or development of the immune system.

A new study from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health reveals that genetic alleles linked to African ancestry may contribute to chronic kidney disease among Hispanic and Latino populations.

In the United States, Hispanics and Latinos comprise just over 15 percent of adults in the country, and remain one of the fastest growing minority groups. Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is associated with higher risk for several chronic medical conditions, including chronic kidney disease (CKD), but the population within the U.S. is genetically diverse. CKD risk and associated risk factors like hypertension and diabetes vary among Hispanics and Latinos based on their country of origin, and likely their continental ancestry background as well.

To learn more about this public health concern, researchers examined the association of an African ancestry-specific allele (APOL1) and a sickle cell trait (HBB variant) with chronic kidney disease measures in 12,226 Hispanics and Latinos.

Dr. Nora Franceschini

Dr. Jianwen Cai

The two study co-authors from the Gillings School are Nora Franceschini, MD, MPH, research associate professor of epidemiology, and Jianwen Cai, PhD, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of biostatistics and interim chair of the biostatistics department.

“The paper describes the prevalence of African-specific genetic risk in Hispanics and Latinos, which usually is unrecognized in these populations,” Franceschini says. “We have learned that there are two genes with genetic variants that are common in individuals of African descent – one related to sickle cell anemia and another linked with the presence of the APOL1 allele – which confer CKD risk to Hispanics and Latinos. Both these variants are already associated with chronic kidney disease in Africans and African-Americans.”

The study findings reveal that, as some Hispanics/Latinos – especially those with roots in the Caribbean region – also have African ancestry, this group also is at risk for chronic kidney disease related to these two genes.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded a three-year, $1.2 million grant to address statistical challenges that arise in the analysis of next-generation expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) studies. In such studies, the goal is to identify and quantify how known genetic variants regulate gene expression across multiple tissues.

Dr. Andrew Nobel

Dr. Fred Wright

The principal investigators are Andrew Nobel, PhD, professor, and Fred Wright, PhD, adjunct professor, both in the Department of Biostatistics in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Nobel also is a professor in UNC’s Department of Statistics and Operations Research, and Wright also serves as a professor of statistics and biological sciences at North Carolina State University.

Their project was selected for funding by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) following a competitive application process.

eQTL studies seek to identify genomic variants that influence the expression of particular genes, thereby influencing higher-level biological functions. The study of eQTLs has proven to be a useful tool in understanding the biological pathways that underlie disease in humans and other populations.

“Until recently, most eQTL analyses in humans were carried out using samples from a single tissue, namely blood,” said Nobel. “Large, multi-tissue eQTL studies such as those being carried out by the NIH Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) consortium have the potential to elucidate the tissue-specific nature of genetic regulation, with important implications for genetic components of disease risk.’’

Nobel and Wright have been members of, and active contributors to, the GTEx consortium since it began in 2010. Their laboratories have contributed software and statistical analyses to the ongoing work of the Consortium, which had its first paper featured as the cover article of Science in 2015.

“We will use this grant to extend our existing work and develop new, network-based software and analysis methods,” Nobel said. “These methods will have applications for biomedical researchers working in genomics and other fields.”

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September 7, 2016

Once again, the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health is the number one public school of public health when it comes to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

NIH provided the data for the 2015 Fiscal Year and UNC’s Gillings School was listed as the number one public school of public health, receiving $58,946,358 in funding for 79 total awards. This was the third year in a row that UNC Gillings was the number one public school of public health for NIH funding and the number three university overall. The 2015 Fiscal Year was the most recent year where all funding data was available. The complete results can be viewed here.

Congratulations to all our faculty and student researchers as they continue to create effective solutions for pressing public health problems, accelerate new areas of inquiry and create new and more efficient methods. Their hard work continues to produce innovative solutions for the people of North Carolina, the nation and the world.